Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This post was meant to go into the CSM minutes feedback thread, but they've been de-stickied, and I'm not entirely sure that anyone would bother to read something posted there now, especially with all the election spam. As well, I'd like to get feedback from folk with more large-scale industrial and especially mining experience, and that's more likely in this forum than elsewhere

The purpose is to look at ways of encouraging industrial activity in null, without breaking or otherwise unduly nerfing high-sec, or infringing on related play-styles.

To start, a quote:



The limiting factor on null industrial production is not a lack of production slots.

In Feythabolis, and in post-alloy Cobalt Edge, most outpost manufacturing slots go unused most of the time. If manufacturing slot availability was a limiting factor, those slots would be in near-constant use, barring excessive use fees. In Feythabolis, manufacturing slots do not cost ISK. I suspect that in most null regions, this is the case.

While production slot availability in player-built outposts is pathetic, even on fully-upgraded Amarr factory outposts, additional production slots can be added fairly easily by setting up an industrial tower. Daily POS maintenance is fairly easy thanks to fuel blocks; importing non-local fuel can be annoying for a small operation, but all null alliances have a good logistics service that can handle such things. POS industrial activity is hampered by the primitive restrictions on access to blueprints and products, but can be overcome by the use of shell corporations, blueprint lockdowns, and good access management and security procedures. Everyone who has dealt with POS industry knows that the entire framework for POS industry needs a massive overhaul, but also that it is not an insurmountable or even a substantial impediment to POS industry. if anything, disincentivizing POS production would be a major error, as it would reduce the number of available targets in space.

So manufacturing slot availability is not, and will never be a limiting factor on industrial activity, even if POSes are never revamped.

To identify the limiting factor on null industry, we need only to compare the Drone Regions before and after the removal of drone alloys. Rogue Drone NPCs, which are the NPCs that spawn in the Drone Regions on the eastern side of the map, had no bounties or module loot until last year, and would instead drop alloys. These alloys had very low volume, but would refine into a lot of low-end minerals.

For example, a typical Drone Horde (Sanctum elsewhere) would yield on average approximately 680 Plush Compound. Each Plush Compound refines into 4096 units of tritanium, 1024 units of pyerite, 64 units of isogen and 4 units of zydrine. That is ~2.78M units of tritanium, or about a Rokh (10.7M units of tritanium) every four Hordes. Since drone alloys also had a huge compression ratio (each alloy is only 1m3), they could easily be exported to empire regions. Tritanium in the drone regions, for example, traded below Jita value.

Under drone alloys, the Drone Regions produced locally almost all of their T1 PvP ships, including capitals. Pilots not infrequently imported BPCs, and built ships, including capitals, with the drone alloys they looted. The excess minerals were funneled into a vast supercapital production industry.

When drone alloys were removed, local ship production dried up, especially on an individual level, and a few months down the road, Drone Region inhabitants, like residents elsewhere, were either importing low-ends from empire (usually compressed via modules), or importing ships wholesale. Since the drone regions did not get hauler spawns until very recently, and still do not drop any modules (aside from the rare officer mod), the drone region mineral supply is now substantially worse than elsewhere.

As the only change was the removal of drone alloys, and the associated mineral supply, it should be clear that the low-end mineral supply is the limiting factor on null industry.

I can think of three potential solutions. I will not go into great detail here; that is best left to professional game designers. But broadly:

The first, and perhaps the easiest is to do nothing. The current system works, and the flow of goods between high-sec and null creates a web of interdependence that is a good source of content. The supply lines come under attack (see the current N3 campaign against Solar supply lines in the LEM/LXQ area), and have to be defended. Events in null can have a substantial impact on high-sec mining and industrial activity, and vice versa. The null demand for ships (and minerals) probably accounts for a substantial portion of the high-sec mineral and ship market, and severing that link may do nasty things to high-sec mineral prices, but this is something that I cannot say for certain. If null industrialists need minerals, they can always add more accounts, mine stuff themselves, or create incentives for local mining activity. And if the prices are right, they can farm out mineral extraction to renters.

The second, is to increase the amount of low-end minerals in high-end ore such as Arkonor, Bistot, and Crokite. These will become the old Plush Compound, yielding a lot of low-end minerals that can be used in local consumption. Jump freighters cannot hold substantial amounts of low-end minerals, but nonetheless, care must be taken to avoid the old problem presented by drone alloys. Module-based mineral compression will have to be nerfed severely, perhaps through a substantial reduction in reprocessing efficiency for Meta-0 modules. Especially problematic will be shallow null, since hidden belt spawns are unaffected by truesec. In short, this will require substantial work in order to avoid re-flooding high-sec with cheap low-ends.

The third, is to more closely link the high-sec and null mineral markets, by substantially reducing the costs of moving minerals over long distances. For example, by reducing the volume of minerals; or by introducing blueprints for the old drone alloys, which have enormous compression ratios. The ISK/hour of mining in high-sec and mining in null will thereby become nearly equivalent in the long run, although they're tending toward that already. Of more concern is the final equilibrium price of low-ends, given the amount of time it takes to mine the low-ends for a ship, relative to the price of those low-ends. Ultimately, the time it takes to mine the minerals for a ship will be about equal to the time it takes to run anomalies/missions to buy that same ship.

Won't be using quotes, because of the restriction on character count, but will try to reply point by point.

I thought that everyone knew this as well. But then we get the above quote, and I start to wonder.

It's not facetious to say that slots aren't a bottleneck to null industry. Bottlenecks tend to be utilized at maximum capacity. From what I recall, station industry slots were in short supply back when drone alloys were a thing in the drone regions, but the fact that industrial activity was much higher there than in the rest of null suggests that station slot access was not a substantial limiting factor, if it had any sort of meaningful impact at all. Most big industrialist did not have much trouble setting up production towers.

At the least, station slot access is so insignificant compared to the low-end mineral bottleneck as to be irrelevant. An overhaul of POS industry would be a much better solution to slot access than expansion of slots either way. I'm not saying that expansion of access to manufacturing sots would be a bad thing, but rather that it won't do anything for the problem we want to solve.

I've heard that mining activity is up, but it hasn't gone up nearly as I, and perhaps CCP, has expected. Either way, the supply of low-ends has decreased substantially, hence the increase in low-end prices. I'd really like to see some numbers on low-end production versus consumption, but that's not something we're going to get. If your estimates are correct, then we're looking at major price increases for T1 ships down the road. That will be offset in part by greater use of T1 cruisers, which can be frighteningly effective, but probably not to any substantial degree. And that is not going to anything good for PvP activity.

In the long run, since mining is now the primary source of minerals, the time/effort spent mining a ship will approach the time/effort spent grinding ISK for it. According to Ripard, it takes about two hours to mine the minerals for a Drake using a well-skilled Hulk. A similarly-skilled player can make about 90M per hour in null anomalies or in high-sec incursions. So in theory, a Drake's natural price under current game mechanics should be somewhere in the area of 180M. That's a frightening number. Incursions do take more effort than AFK mining, but not much more effort than grinding missions or running anomalies, and the risk for all of them is approximately 0 nowadays.

Moving freighters around in null isn't all that risky, if done properly, but it is an utter pain, especially for high-volume production, and is time-consuming due to the need for scouts and web alts, unless you move freighters via titan bridge or something. There's really no reason to make anything in null aside from ammo and rigs from a financial standpoint, because it's both cheaper and more cost-efficient to produce almost everything in high-sec. Any extra costs more than pay for the convenience.

My purpose was to refute CCP's old position that the actual quantity of low-end minerals in null belts was fine, and the undersupply of low-ends in null was due to lack of mining activity. The amount of mining activity it would take to supply null with low-ends out of current grav sites would supply so many high-end minerals that the market for them would implode.

I started playing after drone regions were introduced into the game, so I don't have much knowledge of what the mineral market was like before then. If you have a good source for historical mineral prices, would be very interested in seeing it. From what I can tell, high-end prices have been dropping over the past year, while low-ends have been increasing, but I could be wrong. Either way, low-end and high-end ore values have been approaching one another since drone alloys were removed; that's probably because the actual cost (what you'd call 'risk') of mining in null is close to the cost of mining in highsec. In high-sec, revenue is somewhat lower (for now), but there is a chance of suicide ganks; in null, revenue is higher, but there is a chance of getting distracted and not noticing a red in local, and of the occasional awoxer.

CCP has changed its mind before about what null should be. It abandoned Dominion's vision for null as self-sufficient, high-profit, and high-activity before, most notably with the truesec nerf. It's been a year and a half since the quoted document came out, and judging by some of the things said at the CSM minutes, I'm not sure how much they're sticking to the plan laid out therein.

The drone region nerf was done in no small part in order to buff high-sec mining. Assuming that CCP was paying attention to what minerals drone alloys produced, they would have known that the big buff would be to low-end minerals. So I'm not sure to what extent they'd be willing to roll back on that. If I understand correctly, their plan was for high-sec mining to be as profitable as high-sec mission running. Under drone alloys a miner made somewhere around 10-15M ISK/hour, hardly on par with L4 missions.